“And then everybody’s going to play back Carly Fiorina saying how awful Ted Cruz is,” forecast CNN political commentator Carl Bernstein, who described Cruz as “desperate, truly desperate” after getting “thrashed last night.”

“The cable news cycle is driving this election,” Bernstein explained. “Donald Trump has mastered the cable news cycle unlike anyone in history. Cruz hasn’t gotten near it. Today, Cruz is trying to insert himself in that equation. He has succeeded a little bit; he is going to get a hell of a lot of attention this afternoon.”

Actually, what’s getting the most attention this afternoon out of the way-too-long event, at which Cruz lectured for about half an hour on the five steps to finding an ideal running mate, maybe it was more, we lost count, and Fiorina’s acceptance-of-nomination speech, in which she drew her self up to her full height and let Trump and Hillary Clinton (aka “two sides of the same coin”) have it squarely in the neck, was Fiorina’s demonstration of the song she sings to Cruz’s daughters on the campaign bus:

Appropriately, Fiorina was tinkering with Irvin Berlin’s “You’re Just In Love (I Wonder Why)” from B’way musical Call Me Madam – a political satire in which Ethel Merman played an extremely rich, ill-informed Washington socialite appointed U.S. Ambassador to a fictitious European country – more than half a century before an extremely rich, apparently ill-informed reality-TV star became the GOP presidential race frontrunner:

Getting back to Cruz’s announcement, even Fiorina’s musical performance may not help his campaign.

“Ted Cruz is despised by so much of the — he’s a cult figure, almost, in his party,” Bernstein described. “Trump is a real movement,” the former WaPo journalist added, noting “it’s not for nothing” that, in making his first foreign-policy address of his campaign today, Trump used that phrase America First – “an old neo-fascist slogan and movement.” Bernstein noted. “He’s tapped into the dissatisfaction in this country, deeply, and he’s really got a chance here to do something.”

These days, Veep candidates typically are unveiled at conventions, though this election cycle has hardly been typical. At today’s made-for-TV event, Cruz assured his fans he’d spent much time assessing possible running mates, thinking through pros and cons, studying who these people are…praying about it,” etc. It’s his second Hail Mary pass of the past few days, coming on the heels of his “collusion,” as Trump calls it, with fellow candidate John Kasich in an effort to block the real-estate developer-turned-reality-tv star from getting to 1237 delegates in advance of the GOP convention.